Where Did Jews Live in Antiquity?

In the mid-fourth century BCE, there were settlements of Jews in central Mesopotamia and possibly, in very small numbers, in Egypt, but Jews on the whole still lived in Judea, no part of which was much more than a day’s walk from Jerusalem. Judean Jews constituted a small and overwhelmingly rural population. But there were two growing centers of Jewish population in this period as well, one in Babylonia and one in Egypt, both of which had experienced a significant influx with the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 587 BCE. 

At the time of Alexander’s conquest, which marks the beginning of the Hellenistic period (350 BCE–50 CE), the town of Jerusalem comprised only a small section of the current Old City and perhaps part of the small ridge stretching south from the Dung Gate, an area today called the City of David. It has been argued that in the time of Nehemiah (mid-fifth century BCE), about a century before Alexander’s arrival, only five hundred people lived in Jerusalem, suggesting that the entire province of Yehud held a population of no more than ten thousand. At the beginning of the second century BCE, the events leading up to the Maccabean revolt suggest considerable growth from that low number. Although we can barely guess at plausible figures, the area—that is, the land of Israel west of the Jordan—as a whole may have reached a population close to its carrying capacity of about 500,000 to 1,000,000, including perhaps 250,000 to 500,000 Jews, with 100,000 to 150,000 in the district of Judea, by about the turn of the era. It may be worth noting that such sustained high rates of average population growth are conceivable when there are few pressures on natural resources, few health problems associated with dense urban settlement, and, when all is said and done, surprisingly little damage from war. Such circumstances may have allowed for unusually low mortality rates, especially for infants. Most likely, population growth was very high early on, perhaps until around 180 BCE, when environmental pressures were few and the country was at peace. This would allow us to posit a population of approximately 50,000 to 60,000 at the time of the Maccabean revolt, which would explain the availability of substantial numbers of Judean fighters in that war and the flow of immigration to Egypt. 

Slowing growth rates or even a decline in population might have followed unstable conditions and the constant warfare of the later Hellenistic period. Last, another period of explosive growth may have taken place in the century before the Great Revolt (the first century CE), when Jerusalem became a wealthy city, under Roman rule, at the center of a large religio-economic network. At that point, Jerusalem may have drawn some of its population from elsewhere and continued to increase in size. In comparison, over precisely the same period, the city of Rome grew from a moderate-sized town of several thousand to a city whose inhabitants have been supposed to number nearly a million—although these numbers, too, are admittedly guesses. To the best of our knowledge, Rome experienced a growth rate that far surpassed that of Judea. 

By any reasonable calculation, then, Judea’s population—and its wealth, its presence on the world stage, and its notoriety—all experienced unprecedented growth in the centuries after Alexander’s conquest of the region (see Hellenistic Conquest) and, as it happened, all drastically contracted during the height of the Roman Empire. 

Around the Mediterranean 

The Hellenistic and Roman periods saw the continued settlement of Jews all around the Mediterranean, where they established sizable enclaves in cities like Antioch and Cyrene. But tensions with Rome led to a series of revolts in the first and second centuries CE, resulting in additional dispersions as the unrest was quashed. Revolt, assimilation, and conversion did their work, and the Hellenistic Jewish diaspora all but disappeared, eventually giving way to the rabbinic Judaism developing to the east. By the seventh century CE, Palestinian Jewry was confined to some areas of Galilee and some of the Greek cities of the Mediterranean coast. Once-significant centers of Jewish life in Asia Minor—in the increasingly oppressive grip of the Byzantine state—were in decline. By contrast, Babylonian (Iraqi) Jewry had grown in importance (although we remain ignorant about their numbers), and some communities in North Africa and Europe, previously peripheral, were beginning to move to center stage.